King River Resources’ ongoing metallurgical test work for its giant Speewah specialty metals project in WA’s Kimberley region has successfully produced an iron oxide product assaying 67% iron with low contaminants.
The iron oxide product was extracted using an iron reduction method on a sulphuric acid leach solution, left over from agitated vat leach and column leach tests carried out by Nagrom earlier this year, which had already achieved up to 97% vanadium and 62% titanium extraction.
Further iron reduction, purification and other methods of producing iron oxide are currently being investigated by the company to determine the best processing route.
King River has also produced an intermediate titanium product assaying 80% titanium dioxide using the hydrolysis on the remaining sulphuric acid leach solution, after iron reduction and precipitation of iron sulphate.
A larger amount of this product is being produced to allow the company to test various purification methods that could improve grades further.
The company is also investigating the potential for further hydrolysis and other methods to produce high-quality titanium dioxide products.
Last month, King River successfully extracted a 99.99% alumina product from the sulphate leach solutions before the solution had any other metals removed or had been pre-concentrated.
It is also taking steps to include aluminium and magnesium into its JORC resource estimates for the multi-commodity Speewah project.
Speewah is a remarkable deposit, with a huge global resource of 4.7 billion tonnes at 0.3% vanadium pentoxide, 3.3% titanium dioxide and 14.7% iron.
A scoping-level engineering study by Como Engineers in March, concluded that the CAPEX for the processing plant and the sulphuric acid plant was likely to be around USD$676 million.
By Matt Birney
